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Olam Chesed Yibaneh - The World Will Be Built with Love
- Rabbi Sarah Weissman
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Yom Kippur Morning 5786
On January 14, 1963, George Wallace was sworn in as the governor of Alabama. In his inaugural address, he declared, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Wallace was the face of segregation, famous for standing in a doorway at the University of Alabama to prevent Black students from entering, and even more famous for ordering state troopers to attack civil rights protesters marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on what would come to be known as Bloody Sunday. But it was the same George Wallace who, one day in 1979, quietly entered Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. began his ministry two decades earlier. Wallace apologized to the congregation for the pain and harm he had caused Black people. And it wasn’t just lip service. During his last term as governor of Alabama from 1983-1987, he appointed 160 African-Americans to state boards and agencies and doubled the number of black voter registrars in Alabama’s sixty-seven counties.[1]
So what happened? How did George Wallace change from being a staunch advocate for segregation and white supremacy into a person who sincerely regretted and renounced his former beliefs? While of course we can’t know the inner workings of Wallace’s heart and mind, we do know that an assassination attempt in 1972 left him paralyzed from the waist down. Thereafter, Wallace was a changed man, and not just physically. In fact, when he spoke at Dexter Church, he said, “I have learned what suffering means. In a way that was impossible [before the shooting], I think I can understand something of the pain Black people have come to endure. I know I contributed to that pain, and I can only ask your
forgiveness.”[2] Wallace was changed not only by coming close to death, but also by suffering considerable physical and emotional pain. It seems that his suffering allowed him to feel empathy for African-Americans in a new way; being in pain was something he now had in common with them, and it caused him to regret the harm he had done to them and to want to make amends.
The other event that seems to have left its mark on him is the kindness his political adversaries showed him when he was recovering in the hospital. Ethel Kennedy came to visit Wallace, saying that her husband Robert, who’d been assassinated a few years earlier, would have wanted her to come. Even more surprising was when Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, came to see him. Chisholm and Wallace were both running for president when Wallace was shot, and Chisholm temporarily suspended her campaign in order to visit him. As Wallace’s daughter Peggy remembers, “She and daddy talked real low… They prayed together. Daddy asked her, ’What are your people going to say about you being here?’ She told him it didn’t matter: ‘I would not want this to happen to anyone.’ Daddy’s face changed. There was just something that came over him. I think a seed was planted that day.”[3] According to Peggy, in the months and years after his injury, Wallace spent hours talking to her and her husband about the 1960’s, and eventually admitted to them how wrong he had been and how sorry he was for his racist beliefs and actions. And later, he was able to apologize to some of the people he had harmed, as he did at Dexter Church.
Chisholm’s visit was extraordinary in multiple ways. It wasn’t just personally difficult, as I suspect she wasn’t too fond of George Wallace. It was politically risky too – she knew her visit would anger her supporters. One such supporter was one of her campaign staffers, Barbara Lee. Here’s what Lee said about it. “I said, ‘Miss C.’ …‘How could you do that? I mean this man. First of all, he’s running against you. And secondly, he’s running for president. And thirdly, he’s a segregationist and he’s trying to maintain the status quo that you’re trying to change.’ And once again, she shook her finger at me. She said, ‘Little girl,’ she says, ‘C’mon now, you’re working with me in my campaign, helping me,’ she said. ‘But sometimes we have to remember we’re all human beings, and I may be able to teach him something, to help him regain his humanity, to maybe make him open his eyes to make him see something that he has not seen.’ She said, ‘So you know you always have to be optimistic that people can change, and that you can change and that one act of kindness may make all the difference in the world’….‘I know people are really angry,’ she said, ‘but you have to rise to the occasion if you’re a leader, and you have to try to break through and you have to try and open and enlighten other people who may hate you.’ And that’s what she taught me,” Lee concluded.[4]
It seems that the combination of coming close to death, suffering great pain, and being the recipient of unearned kindness caused George Wallace to do just what Shirley Chisholm had hoped for: to regain his humanity, to see something he hadn’t seen before, to change.
It’s a remarkable story, but you might be wondering, what does this have to do with me? The circumstances Wallace found himself in are pretty unique, to be sure. But while we might not bear the sins that George Wallace bore, we might still feel weighed down by our faults or past failings, and feel that there’s no hope of ever ridding ourselves of them. Wallace’s story reminds us that change – true, profound change, is possible. Even for George Wallace. Even for us.
Now, we probably shouldn’t go out looking for a near-death encounter or other painful experience to help us improve our characters. Judaism has never been into self-flagellation. But what about radical kindness? I would hope that each of us has had experiences of unearned, unexpected kindness. Maybe it isn’t in the dramatic form of Shirley Chisholm visiting George Wallace in the hospital after an assassination attempt, but perhaps we have known other acts of generosity and compassion that surprised us and moved us, and made us reconsider some things. The good news is that even if we haven’t had any of those kind of experiences, we have a substitute: we have this day. Yom Kippur is our annual near-death experience. We refrain from life-affirming activities like eating and procreating, and we wear white, the color of traditional Jewish burial shrouds. Yom Kippur is also a day for just a bit of suffering, a day to “afflict our souls.” We make ourselves uncomfortable, feeling the emptiness of our stomachs and the weariness that comes with a full day of praying. And Yom Kippur is a day on which we encounter the radical lovingkindness of God, who despite our failings, accepts us and forgives us. One day every year, we imagine what it would be like to stare death in the face, only to be brought back from the precipice by a merciful God.
On this holy day, we might see ourselves in George Wallace, and be encouraged to know that however set in our ways we think we are, something just might break through our defenses and break open our hearts. We might also hope to see ourselves in Shirley Chisholm, whose compassion and optimism were the catalyst for another person’s change. The Hebrew word for this kind of kindness is chesed. As the great medieval scholar Maimonides explains it, “[Ch]esed [denotes] an excess and it is especially used to refer to extraordinary kindness. Chesed is practiced in two ways: first, we show kindness to those who have no claim whatever upon us; secondly, we are kind to those to whom it is due, in a greater measure than is due to them.”[5] The Hebrew Bible abounds with examples of chesed: Abraham rushing to welcome strangers into his tent, Rebekah offering water to Abraham’s servant Eliezer and to his camels, Ruth insisting on staying with her mother-in-law Naomi after their husbands have died. The Rabbis of the Talmud went so far as to say that the whole Torah was written just to impress upon us the necessity of chesed (Sot. 14a). The Psalmist writes, “Olam chesed yibaneh. The world is built with chesed” (89:3). And as author Tara Mizrahi points out, “The word ‘built’ suggests the world of kindness on earth is not created by a single utterance, rather it is built like one builds a house - brick by brick, good deed by good deed, prayer by prayer. The way a world of kindness happens is painstaking and deliberate. It requires many hands and much effort and love - even when we tire and feel like quitting.”[6]
The story of Shirley Chisholm’s act of chesed was retold in the New York Times recently, with the subheading of the article including a question: “Could this happen today?”[7] The author of the article seems to think it could not. He may be right, especially if he limits his question to the realm of politicians. But Jewish tradition teaches us that our task is to try to prove him wrong. Olam chesed yibaneh. The word for “build” is actually in the future tense. The world will be built with lovingkindness. But only if we are the builders.
[2]https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/2021/0114/George-Wallace-Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-and-the-power-of-forgiveness
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/16/changed-minds-reconciliation-voices-movement-episode/
[5] Guide for the Perplexed, Part 3, 53:2.
